How good is CORBA?

[Sai Krishna M]

Hi everybody,

i have been developing web based applications using python+cheetah.

The numbers are increasing. The applications have many common parts of
code. Though these applications are separate from each other they are
run in the same server.

I heard about CORBA... but also heard that it has some flaws...like
the programming being very complicated.
Also heard that CORBA is no more used these days...

Can someone suggest me a better option or is corba fine?

Thanks,
Sai

 

[Gary Duzan]

Hi everybody,

i have been developing web based applications using python+cheetah.

The numbers are increasing. The applications have many common parts of
code. Though these applications are separate from each other they are
run in the same server.

I heard about CORBA... but also heard that it has some flaws...like
the programming being very complicated.
Also heard that CORBA is no more used these days...

CORBA is good for what it is good for. It does take some time
to get up to speed on it, but eventually most of it makes sense.
Some of the language mappings, especially C++, can be hard to use
safely, but the Python mapping is much easier to use.

If you need good performance, multiple language support, multiple
OS/hardware platform support, and preferably control both ends of
the communication, CORBA may be for you. Check out omniORB for C++
and Python (http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/), and JacORB for Java
(http://www.jacorb.org/).

Good luck.

Gary Duzan
Motorola CHS

 

[cyberco]

Check out Jini. It's being proposed as an Apache project nowadays and
really shines when it comes to making distributed services work
together. Each application can be exposed as a Jini service whereby
other services only know the Java interface the service proxy
implements. How you implement the service itself (python?) or the
communication between the proxy and the service back-end (XML-RPC? RMI?
FTP? E-mail?) is completely up to you. Jini may look difficult at the
beginning, but distributed systems are inherently difficult. Jini just
makes them clear and forces you to deal with them in the easiest way
possible. In my opinion Jini is one of the best kept secrets of
distributed computing. Read up on the vision behind Jini to get an idea
of mother of all SOA technologies.

2B

 

[Irmen de Jong]

I heard about CORBA... but also heard that it has some flaws...like
the programming being very complicated.
Also heard that CORBA is no more used these days...

CORBA's wire protocol (GIOP/IIOP) is heavily used in (java) EJB servers.

Can someone suggest me a better option or is corba fine?

Well, if you are in a 100% python environment, I would suggest
to use Pyro instead (http://pyro.sf.net)
Or some other pure-Python RPC mechanism.

--Irmen

 

[Sander Steffann]

Hi,

CORBA's wire protocol (GIOP/IIOP) is heavily used in (java) EJB servers.


Well, if you are in a 100% python environment, I would suggest
to use Pyro instead (http://pyro.sf.net)
Or some other pure-Python RPC mechanism.

If, on the other hand, you want/have to combine different programming
languages and different environments, then CORBA will be a big help. For
example: Making objects implemented in Python on a Linux machine work with
objects implemented in C++ on a Windows machine (or even with objects
implemented in COBOL on a mainframe) will be no problem at all.

In our company we use CORBA a lot, even though we mostly use Python these
days. It gives us a lot of flexibility, while on the other hand it 'forces'
us to strictly define the interfaces of our objects before implementing
them. But that is a good thing

- Sander